Frank Wedekind's themes are sexual freedom, childhood and education, and this novella, translated into English from German for the first time, reads as controversially now as it did when he wrote it in 1903. A maverick with no political ideology, Wedekind is best known for his play Spring Awakening (1891), which covers the same themes less obliquely, gaining him a reputation as a pornographic enemy of society.

Narrated by an elderly woman looking back at her education in a bizarre boarding school for girls, Mine-Haha details their lessons – limited to physical arts and music – in precise, clinical language long on fetishistic detail and erotic in undertone: "From the very first day they put me to task walking on my hands. Two of the girls held me up by the legs. My hair hung down to the ground, the dress fell from my belt down to the back of my neck."

This dreamlike, airless book is all the more disturbing because the girls have little curiosity; and when the narrator is released into the world she knows not how to deal with it. Mine-Haha could be interpreted (as some did in Wedekind's time) as "the pubescent dream of a bold schoolboy"; but if read in the context of his other work attacking the repressive nature of education, it is a dystopian call to arms; the image of girls walking on their hands not just erotic but subversive, upending the world order. This slim volume is fresh, perverse and disconcerting. Sophia Martelli